August 3 - 7, 1998

Wednesday, August 3,
1998

Whose dreams?

A thicket of summer grassis all that remainsof the dreams and ambitionsof ancient warriors.

--- Basho

It's like something out of an end-of-the-world movie ---
no people, only waist-high brown grass and the city skyline in the distance.
But the noise! A fierce dry wind whines across the fields; trucks rattle
over the cracking pavement at full speed; the giant machinery at RMC Lonestar
roars incessantly as it spews out ready-mix concrete.

This is Mission Bay, the rough triangle of land south of Market that
lies within Townsend, Seventh, Mariposa, and Terry A. François Boulevard.
It's a dead zone, a vacuum waiting to be filled. And that's exactly what
the Catellus Development Corporation would like to do.

It seems to be a win-win situation. Catellus has a vast expanse of undeveloped
former Southern Pacific land on its hands that it would like to bring in
some income. UCSF needs a new campus. The city needs new jobs and new housing.
The plans are no secret. They've been emblazoned across front pages and
explored at length in a 3-volume EIR: in their latest incarnation, they
call for a mixed-use development covering 300 acres, which will include
1.5 million square feet of retail space; 5.5 million square feet for research
and development, light manufacturing, and office space; about 6,000 residential
units; a 500-room hotel; and a 43-acre UCSF campus.

A project like this offers the opportunity of a lifetime for a person
of vision, and there's nothing at all the matter with Catellus CEO Nelson
Rising's eyes. His face lights up as he describes the thought processes
that have gone into creating this real-life Sim City from scratch, which
--- with an area modeled on London's Berkeley Square
as its centerpiece --- will become a new defining image
for San Francisco.

The trouble with building on vacant lots, though, is that they're never
really empty. As construction begins, the bulldozers will stir up a lot
more than just annoying dust and toxic soil. The environmental impact report
doesn't mention ghosts. But they're there. And they'll be watching.

Just as, when there really was a bay here, three Ohlone Indians watched
a European sailor paddle a dugout into its waters, their tear-stained faces
inspiring the first Spanish name for the area --- Ensenada
de los Llorones, or Cove of the Weepers.

Just as the de Haro gente de razon watched a parade of Anglo squatters
put down stakes on their potrero nuevo, the pastureland around the
water's edge granted to their family by the Mexican government.

And just as the early citizens of the U.S. city of San Francisco watched
a frenzy of land speculators clamber over one another, scrambling to buy
underwater lots at South Beach and Mission Bay.

Spectral gazes to be reckoned with, to be sure, but the most powerful
phantasmal surveillance comes from people who occupied this space later,
when the bay had been filled in and buildings erected on the newly created
land --- scavengers who patiently combed through the
"dump trust"; ironworkers who poured out pig iron at the Pacific
Rolling Mills; ropemakers who traced a path back and forth within the 1,000-foot-long
Tubbs Cordage Works; and above all, shipbuilders and longshoremen who kept
the waterfront functioning smoothly. These were the men who lived in workers'
boardinghouses on Irish Hill and Dutchman's Flat and Scotch Hill, who drank
hard and fought exuberantly. These men and, when they were lucky, their
families gave life to the city of hard-headed finance on the other side
of town. They defined San Francisco for the rest of the world.

Jack London understood: "North of the Slot [for the cable on Market
Street] were the theaters, hotels, and shopping district, the banks and
the staid, respectable business houses. South of the Slot were the factories,
slums, laundries, machine-shops, boiler works, and the abodes of the working
class. The Slot was the metaphor that expressed the class cleavage of Society."
And that class structure, though oppressive at times, provided a symbiosis
of capital and labor that allowed the city to flourish.

Can we take Mission Bay as the metaphor that expresses the new San Francisco?
The project must be seen as the most coherent part of a general development
spree that is oozing across Market and south toward Hunters Point. It reflects
the emerging American reality, in which traditional working-class industrial
jobs are rapidly disappearing and new-style working-class service jobs are
in increasingly short supply. And it is intended not simply to turn a profit
for Catellus but also to solve some very real problems facing the city.

The question is not if Mission Bay should be built. The present wasteland
is an abominable eyesore and a shameful abdication of civic responsibility.
The question is how Mission Bay should be built. Will its labs and offices
coalesce into a new urban nucleus, a biotechnocratic hub, supported by nothing
but its own shifting landfill? Will it be an unsafe piece of shoddy, fobbed
off on an indifferent populace? Or will it be forced to reach out toward
the rest of the city, to escort San Francisco into the future, borne on
the shoulders of its own sturdy past?

There's no crystal ball for this one, only questions. Producing some
sort of result will be easy --- the mechanisms are
already in place. The danger is that we will be saddled for all eternity
with a Seaside-West or a Silicon Valley themepark just South of the Slot.
It's only by paying incessant attention to every detail, from financing
to infrastructure, that we can ensure the construction of the city-within-a-city
that we want. We must direct our passionate concern toward the rebuilding
of Mission Bay; we must listen to the voices of the ghosts who inhabit the
area now. Otherwise, we will have to blame ourselves as well as Catellus
if we find a classless, raceless, bloodless Truman Show just inside our
own back door.

It's like the graffiti artist said. The older San Francisco gets, the
more we realize that everything mattered.